Enough ranting about playing games In Character for now and I should stop calling other people silly. I’ll continue with my little story instead. I was aware that WoW wasn’t the game for me for a long time, I wasn’t really “playing the game” and if I did I got quickly bored of it. I’m not going to deny it’s a very good game, it’s an incredibly polished and well-made game, probably the best MMO created so far, but it doesn’t mix well with my rather idealistic view on MMOs. The whole item-hunting (be it in raiding / PvP’ing /questing), it doesn’t me interest me (anymore). Leveling up. Following mechanical goals that supposedly give you some sense of achievement. I don’t fall for it. I’m not a rat. Or well, perhaps I guess I’m just pretending to not fall for it and still partly do. But WoW isn’t for me. In my time on Defias Brotherhood, I enjoyed roleplaying and just playing In Character together with others the most. And WoW, while being a beautiful world, isn’t the ideal environment for that. It’s all a bit meaningless and unrealistic. For roleplaying in a MMO, actions need to have consequences or it will simply not be too realistic, especially not when there are asshats involved. WoW is way too mechanically restrictive, it’s a small static world and having most of the players being stuck in instances all day, grinding away doesn’t help much.

I realised all this while I was still playing WoW, it’s probably where my rather unique playstyle came from. But I still enjoyed playing the game a lot. I created my own fun, as if it was a little sandbox instead of a Diablo-style item-hunting MMO. And I did have a lot of fun. Next to that, like many other MMO players, I enjoyed the whole community a lot. Just logging in to chat for a few minutes before going to sleep and finding yourself still behind your computer screen 3 hours later chatting with the same people (completely unaware of the time), wasn’t uncommon. And you know, I think I could still play WoW and enjoy it if I really wanted to. But I knew it wasn’t my game and I was sure I’d move on sooner or later.

A year ago in February I simply just tried out the Eve Online trial, I heard some good stories about it a few months earlier, but I was thinking about leaving WoW at all and was still enjoying the game. But reading things like this and this got me excited enough to try it out with a trial. While playing the trial and reading some about Eve-O I started the ponder if it was a good idea to play both WoW and Eve-Online. I didn’t directly enjoy the trial all that much, missioning and mining didn’t seem ‘that’ much fun, but I enjoyed the complexity and possibilities. I also loved the amount of articles around the backstory of Eve, although I did dislike the main ideas behind the 4 Empires, which seemed so simple and cliché to me. A religious (almost Christian) Empire, a capitalistic state and a bureaucratic democracy. In 10k years we’d end up with factions like these? Yeah right, the only remotely original faction were the Minmattar and their rebellious roots. Ah well, I might write a blog-entry about this later.

I also directly tried to get into the RP side of things and tried to find out how that exactly worked out in this game. I made my character a True Amarrian, cause I thought I’d enjoy a not-so-nice religous zealot. A bit like my troll character in WoW. I also directly looked for a good RP’ish corporation, because I knew this was a MMO where you really need some people to play with to fully enjoy it. I also intended to join a mostly single-race corp, something that would fit my character. Aegis Militia, Vigiliant Vigeria (I always write it wrong), PIE, CVA.. It was quite hard to choose between them for a newbie like me back then. CVA sounded awesome, but was probably impossible to join for a newbie. So I went for PIE Inc, which I guess made the best impression on me as an outsider.

It still took some time until I really fell in love with Eve-O (even now I’m sometimes looking for reasons and motivation). I remember having some very good moments in my first 2-3 weeks. I remember joining some random other people in a mining operation, where I, with my simple frigate, got paid by the others to ‘protect’ them, while it actually was me that needed the protection. I also remember doing some ratting in both low-sec and high-sec together with someone else of the Imperial Academy (newbie corporation that everyone automaticly joins after creating a character). But mostly, I think it was slightly boring and I had hope it’d change after joining a good corporation (but those recruiters of PIE were busy for a long-long time), while there were some alright people out there in the chat-channel of the Imperial Academy, spam and whining mostly annoyed the hell out of me.

I also remember exploring the Providence in my 2nd or 3rd week, ending up at the Inflattable House, where suddenly more than hundred pilots gathered outside the station. Mostly CVA, even a few PIE. And gees, so many ships certainly was impressive for a WoW-player like me. They all aligned to a stargate and slowly moved in that direction for a few minutes before warping towards it. My computer lagged a little bit, but I followed the fleet for a while, until I was told to stop following or being shot down in Local. I felt slightly insulted that I, as fellow Amarrian, wasn’t allowed to help them, but I quickly obeyed. A day later I heard it was the beginning of a mayor campaign versus Ushra’Khan, where CVA took over a station (Karishals Defiance, which was renamed to Karishals Folly) of them.